SACO — Big plays have been Thornton Academy’s calling card this football season, and the trend continued Friday night against South Portland.

Four of Thornton’s five touchdowns came on plays of at least 30 yards. On defense, the Trojans twice closed down rugby punt attempts to create costly turnovers on downs, and they came up with a strip and fumble recovery to negate a nice South Portland gain.

The result was a 35-7 victory for the No. 1 team in the Varsity Maine top 10.

“Our coaching staff does a great job of seeing what’s there and what’s not, but when you put a bunch of athletes on the field, big plays are going to happen,” explained Wyatt Benoit, Thornton’s senior quarterback.

Thornton improved to 5-1 in Class A South with its third consecutive win against other contenders. South Portland slipped to 4-2, a week after losing at Bonny Eagle.

Benoit scored Thornton’s first two touchdowns on similar running plays of 45 and 31 yards. Both times, he cut up field after running to his right and then made South Portland tacklers miss.

South Portland did score its lone touchdown between those runs.

Thornton picked up one more first-half touchdown on 30-yard pass from Benoit to Jackson Paradis just 34 seconds before halftime. The third of Yeonwoo Kim’s five point-after kicks made it 21-7 at halftime.

Paradis said as he came off the line on the left side of Thornton’s formation, he saw the South Portland defender drifting toward the sideline.

“I’m running a comeback-and-go, so when I saw that, I’m thinking, ‘it’s looking pretty good.’ So I ran a comeback-and-go, and Wyatt threw me a great ball,” Paradis said.

The touchdown was set up when Thornton’s defense overplayed South Portland’s rugby punt approach and caught punter/quarterback Easton Healy for a 13-yard loss, giving the Trojans the ball at the Red Riots 45.

One more big play on offense came in the third quarter – at an unexpected time.

With about a foot to go for a first down, the Trojans rolled out their full-house backfield for the first time in the game, featuring Benoit under center with three backs lined up behind him. Sophomore Brennan Tabor took the handoff, got through the line, made a cut to his right, and raced in for a 31-yard score.

Tabor is quickly making a name for himself. He was the player who stripped the ball and went 99 yards with a fumble recovery to dramatically turn momentum in Thornton’s win two weeks ago against Bonny Eagle. Last Friday, Thornton pulled out a win at Noble when Ryan Camire returned a kickoff 77 yards for a score in the fourth quarter, right after Noble had taken the lead.

“We certainly have explosive players, and it’s one of our keys,” said Thornton Coach Kevin Kezal. “You want to prevent them on defense and create them on offense because when you play good football teams, it’s hard to grind out 10-, 12-play drives.”

Especially in the first half, there were many plays where South Portland showed it was the physical equal of Thornton. The Red Riots had two lengthy drives and scored on their second to tie the game, 7-7. They ran 15 more plays in the first half than Thornton.

When Healy was dinged up while recovering a bad snap and had to sit for a few plays, backup junior quarterback Parker Reny came on and quickly completed three passes to set up Healy’s 1-yard touchdown run.

Reny took most of the snaps in the second half and finished 10 of 20 passing for 100 yards.

What South Portland was unable to do was produce a big play of its own to get back into the game.

“With the physical piece, we knew we would be able to play in the trenches with them,” said South Portland Coach Aaron Filieo. “But look, we were just really undisciplined, and they made us pay. Where we lost gap integrity (on defense), they found it. Where we were misaligned, they found it.”